A Semi-autonomous Stereotactic Brain Biopsy Robot with Enhanced Safety

In stereotactic brain biopsy, operating the needle accurately and taking the biopsy specimen safely are two major challenges for ensuring the success of the surgical procedure. Considering this fact, surgical robots offering high accuracy and precision have been developed for neurosurgery including brain biopsy. Typical brain biopsy robots are only commanded to adjust the needle's pose before inserting the needle manually by a neurosurgeon. In the literature, there exists no robotic system that is competent to complete the needle insertion task autonomously. To move a step forward, a novel biopsy module for brain biopsy is first designed and fabricated in this paper. The biopsy module can be automated to complete a series of tasks such as inserting the needle, generating and controlling the aspiration pressure for specimen acquisition, and rotating the cannula for side-cutting. The biopsy module is further integrated with a cost-effective and lightweight UR5 robot and an optical tracking system to improve the autonomy, leading to a stereotactic neuronavigation system. Kinematic relationships of the involved elements are established via a calibration process. A quadratic programming based approach equipped with a virtual potential field method is implemented to safely control the robot with joint-limit avoidance and obstacle avoidance capabilities. The experimentation of the brain biopsy robot is performed, demonstrating that the developed robotic system has potential applicability in the brain biopsy surgery.